Fashion Garments

Backstage at Issey Miyake stood 15 male models dressed in dark pants and white lab coats like tall, rail thin, particularly good looking pharmacists. I was ecstatic to be there with them. Not because of the models; nor because of the show; but because I was in Paris, the city of lights, my favourite city, the city that on its worst day still kills Milan on its best.

Paris is about as different from Milan as apples and bananas. Milan is flashy, all-business and grey; Paris is sophisticated, open and alive.

I’d arrived a few moments before and walked straight backstage without so much as a glance from security. The show was a few minutes from starting and all around, photographers directed models to stand up against this wall, pose with that boy, or jump over this imaginary line. Finally, the designer stepped forward and asked the models to remove their labcoats. Underneath were a myriad of different colours, patterns and proportions.

The music began. An English man sang “I love you but don’t touch me cos you’re sick.”

I stood with the backstage photographers and watched the show take place from behind the scenes – always the best spot in the house.

The outfits were all over the place. Everything from tie dye to plaid, fluoro ginghams to camos to zebra stripes. Orange, red, green, brown, yellow and grey. The only consistency that I could find was in the inconsistency of so many different patterns, colours and textures.

Later I found out the collection was inspired by coffee. If you think of the life cycle of a coffee bean, from South American jungle to Parisian cafe, you can imagine that the contrasts would be huge.

It was backstage at Issey Miyake that I ran into Steve Wood again. Steve is the 63-year-old British backstage and paparazzi photographer that I worked with for four weeks halfway through last year at five fashion weeks in Milan, Paris and Berlin. Steve is crazy. Crazy like a fox. So when he offered to give me a lift to Louis Vuitton, a show I’d been trying to get an invitation to for near on five weeks, I jumped at the opportunity.

Working with Steve typically involves holding a flash a few metres away from him, ‘painting with light’ (his words), as he shoots photo after photo after photo of models backstage or celebrities front of house. Steve’s one of those people with an all-access pass to life. Nothing stands outside of his reach. Needless to say, getting into Louis Vuitton with him was a breeze.

The powerhouses in Paris (Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Chanel, Hermes) terrify me. Even going backstage with Steve as a legitimate assistant is terrifying. At any point you could be walking along, trying to mind your business, and an overzealous PR agent with a bone to pick or a security guard with a muscle to flex could take exception to your presence and make things problematic. And backstage at one of those shows, if you’re evicted, it’s in front of a good 50 people. 
 

source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10621697